Browsing by Subject "questioning"

Objective of the study. Previous studies have concluded that applying collaborative learning methods in university courses, such as a small group work, enhances profound understanding of a learning issue and students’ thinking processes. In a group, students bring up new ideas and process, justify them from different perspectives, evaluate explanations and try to form a shared understanding of the theme to be studied. Questions have been found to be effective for improving students’ deep and collaborative knowledge elaboration, but the interrelationship between these two has not been investigated extensively, thus, only in the context of medical education. The objective of this study was to analyse how questions are used in a small group discussion for enhancing undergraduate students’ collaborative elaboration of knowledge in the context of biosciences. Methods. In this study, the video data collected from a small group discussion in a field course in biology were analysed. The focus of the analysis were the utterances in the group discussion of eight first-year bioscience students and their teacher. The aim of the group work and the discussion was to find out the students’ prior knowledge and elaborate ideas for defining a research problem. Theory-based content analysis was used to classify different question types and the quality of elaboration in answers that the students expressed. Finally, different question types were compared in relation to the quality of subsequent answers. Results and conclusions. In line with previous studies, the students elicited factual and declarative questions checking prior knowledge and the accuracy of their ideas. The teacher presented explanative and meaningful questions when asking the students to interpret and meta questions when encouraging other students to join a discussion. The students rarely elaborated and explained learning issues collaboratively. When answering, the students accepted different ideas without explaining or elaborating them further. When the teacher was involved in a discussion, the teacher explained and clarified issues on behalf of the students. The results emphasised the interpretation that students are used to express simple questions that do not challenge their thinking but that teachers can use explanative and meaningful questions to support students to elaborate their ideas thoroughly. The results show that applying collaborative learning methods requires that students are taught to ask meaningful questions and that pedagogical programs aiming at learning question strategies enhancing collaborative learning are developed and made available for teachers.